Corridor 7: Alien Invasion

The Good
This was released shortly after 'Doom' (the advertising slogan being 'Prepare to meet thy Doom', with 'meet' crossed out and replaced with 'beat'), and was hyped as a serious competitor. However, it's based around the 'Wolfenstein' engine, and despite its historical status as an early example of engine-sharing (unless you count 'Manic Miner' and 'Jet Set Willy' of course) it's not actually very good.

The Bad
Pretty much everything that is wrong with 'Wolfenstein' is wrong with this, except that whereas 'Wolfenstein' is acceptable as a historical document, this isn't. Therefore, the gameplay is extremely monotonous, the graphics are chunky and unattractive, and you just run around shooting things over and over again. The sci-fi setting should help, but doesn't, as everything looks goofy. It's basically a sub-standard shareware game granted a commercial release.

The Bottom Line
A poor early 'Doom' competitor based around the 'Wolfenstein' engine. Not good.

The Good
The box art isn't THAT bad, the music is pretty cool, if annoying at times, and the weapons are fun to find and use, the aliens are pretty neat looking, and the games sci-fi theme adds a cool touch to the overall experience.

The Bad
First of, this NOT a DooM clone, its a poor Wof3D clone, using, amazingly, the same engine, in 1994! What was Capstone thinking?

The graphics, for a start, are terrible, although not as bad as in Nerves Of Steel. The wall textures are horrendously pixelated, as are the aliens, weapons, and the floors\ceilings. They make poor use of the engine in that area to start with.

The gameplay is, well, the same as every other FPS. You run around, grabbing health and ammo, red and blue key cards, and kill stuff. The catch here is that you need to go back to the elevator to exit each level, which is where you start each level! The in-game auto-map helps you through the levels however.

Back the levels, which suffer from each level being to similar the last one. The level design is not very creative, and won't do much to keep players interested in the game-world.

And finally, the box says that it uses an "Enhanced Wolfenstein Engine".

Enhanced? I think not!

The Bottom Line
Capstone once again rose to their notoriety as the worst game developers in history with this awful Wolf3D clone. Really NOT RECOMMENDED (lest you say i didn't warn you).

The Good
Why does everyone keep saying that this game sucks? I mean, come on. It used the Wolfenstein 3-D engine because Capstone apparently couldn't afford the Doom engine, and this game was released just a few months after the original Doom. And if you're going to call this game "monotonous", you might as well call Wolfenstein monotonous as well, something that you're not doing right now. And I can honestly say that the level designs are up to the Wolfenstein engine's capabilities. Come on, give Capstone a chance.

Corridor 7 isn't really anything groundbreaking, something you'll evidence from the fact that it uses the Wolfenstein engine. But it still delivers plenty of fun moments, cool weapons, and nasty monsters that should please fans of first-person shooters. It wouldn't be wrong to call it "Wolfenstein in a sci-fi setting". There are a few cool innovations in this game, too, like morphing monsters, invisible monsters that can only be sighted with your infrared goggles, and night vision.

The Bad
I don't have anything bad to say about the game, still considering that it uses the Wolfenstein engine.

The Bottom Line
If it were released about a year earlier in its current form, it would've been revolutionary. Still, as it stands, it's an awesome Wolfenstein-style game that's a lot of fun to play. Many would think this is just another Wolfenstein clone (especially given the crappy user reviews), but you should still give this one a try if you're a fan of the genre.